This is what I feel like. Like something is torn out of me. They are killing my baby, they are killing a part of me. I woke up today to hear they kicked the person they don’t like that they’d been bullying, and they demoted me to a rank called “guild master” that has no power (I used to be “muse”, and as far as I remember my only permission before was to be able to see officerchat, but I have never checked what other permissions I had), changed shandare’s rank to “god”, also taking away his permissions, and wrote a guild message that shows up every time anyone logs in, including content like things suck now because we have become toxic and allow sexual harassment.

Kaelli left without giving us any time. Despite her having agreed to not flake with no warning and her guarantee she would stay the whole tier. She said the drama and sexual harassment were too much and she couldn’t take it anymore. When she posted she would no longer be raiding with us, kittiez and wuf both followed with posts that said the same thing. Since it was obvious kittiez was not raiding with us before, I can only imagine they were doing it in this coordinated manner to cause the most impact, the most fear, the most uncertainty they could.

Wuf had told me the day earlier he would leave, but when I asked him if he could give us 2 weeks so we could have a bit of leeway to replace him, he said that of course he would. But now with him typing this to synchronize with kittiez and kaelli, and ignoring my message double checking with him, I fear he has no qualms in going back on his words to help cause me and the guild the maximum harm he can.

I hear talen left without ever having responded to me. Perhaps he also feels I do not deserve the respect of being warned he is going to flake, and it’s also ok with him if I have to stay up all night many nights in a row to recruit because of these flakes.

With these people flaking out, and kittiez and Nymn also flaming out, we are suddenly down 5 people from our 26-person roster. And there are players who cannot make raid times this week. So we are hovering about 20 people. Anything can happen now, if anyone doesn’t feel great this weekend, if anyone has power issues, anything at all can prevent us from being able to raid.

I understand that right now, nimn’s and also maybe kittiez’s goal is to cause me the most mental anguish and harm possible. They know what I care about, so they’re targeting that. I care about my guild. So they do things in a way that makes the guild the most untenable. Coordinating people posting that they are quitting, to cause the most uncertainty and lower morale the most. Writing a message that will make anyone who logs on get hit by thoughts of the guild being toxic and condoning sexual harassment (which hurts me even more, similar to the carain situation when she said I condone mysogyny, I don’t think many people could be more against sexual harassment than rape victims like me, yet I am accused of condoning it when I don’t even know about it). And now that I think of it, if she is GM and insists on holding this power, actually isn’t it her job to deal with things like that? But she doesn’t deal with it, and uses the fact that it exists to imply that shandare and I condone it, making it our problem instead of the problem of the person who is supposed to be most responsible for it.

All this, and more, makes me grieve deeply for my guild. I didn’t know until today how much my guild meant to me. I had always done everything for it, but because I had GM before, no matter what happened it was on me to fix things and I always could fix things. So I had never thought too much of its meaning for me. But this is something I cannot fix. She can toy with us as much as she likes and ruin this guild. The only thing we would be able to do is to abandon this place and form a new guild. And as I realized today that this is pretty much inevitable, I felt like my guts were torn out of me. I felt like my baby was being killed, and what purpose was my existence anymore? I want to die. I don’t want to exist in this world anymore.

I have always believed in treating people with respect. In my life there are people who I feel have physically or mentally abused me, and yet I believe they deserve to be treated with decent human respect, because their few bad actions do not encompass the whole of them. Yet, time and again, I am in circumstances that prove people do not think I deserve respect.

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My type of panic attack is weird. It only happens when I’m typing, because it only happens when I’m dealing with some issue with someone in WoW. What happens is that the keys of the keyboard suddenly feel like oceans, then like universes, and each movement of my finger is like a needle disappearing into a great vastness of nothing. Then I feel like all the space around me is twisted, and I exist in a vast space of nothing. I feel like I’m going to be swallowed up by all this, that I myself have become thinner than a needle, flatter than a piece of paper, smaller than a dot that shows position but actually has no mass and does not exist. And the sounds, they ring in my ears, they are also so loud, so enormous. They fill my ears and my head and my everything.

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There has been a lot of tension between our GM (guild master) and our RL (raid leader) for several months now. I had ignored it kind of and hoped it would resolve itself, and tried to take myself out of everything, telling myself this is not my responsibility now. But it kept getting worse, to the point where drama was flaring up in raid, and one of our raiders, who is a very close friend of our GM, got so upset at our RL she straight up quit the game. Then for some reason our GM promoted her friend above everyone else, including our RL, and took away some RL permissions.

By this point, our RL felt entirely betrayed and that he could no longer trust our GM, and our GM said she was not going to show up to raid this week, despite being in a key tank position.

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Each person may want different things from their raid leader. And there is no perfect raid leader out there, each person will have their own faults and weaknesses. And WoW mythic raiding will amplify these faults, because of the constant need for close interaction for long hours in high-stress situations. But there are certain things I would want from my own raid leader, and for the most part shandare checks these boxes.

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Sometimes I wonder how many people ask themselves this. Today in raid, shandare was again really great at working to keep morale up. And most people seemed to enjoy themselves. It was mentioned to me that raid seemed really happy today by completely unrelated people. But if people paid close attention and were able to see the raid chat window, they would have seen certain flare ups that happened today that were not at all happy. A few different people got upset today and basically threw tantrums. Either they raged at themselves or raged at others, but one way or another they behaved in a way that caused everyone else to feel uncomfortable and awkward. And I wonder, do they even realize that in their own moments of anger, they are causing problems to many other people that have nothing to do with their anger?

The big question that I’ve been thinking about is, do people not have the bottom line of never allowing themselves to needlessly hurt others?

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When I was first traumatized, many years ago, I did not feel I had the luxury to try to rest and recover. Leadership in WoW mythic guilds is putting out fire after fire, or putting out the embers before fires start, non-stop, on top of the endless work of boss preparation and character maintenance. So I kept going despite the trauma, for over a year, constantly deepening my trauma since the stuff that traumatized me are just normal things guild leaders have to contend with (hence why suicide is common among guild leaders, and the large majority of us eventually burn out and quit the game).

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While I thrash about in my trauma, my mind thinks only of my pain and the bad behavior of people that brought about my pain. But though that is what my mind focuses on, that is not at all representative of the truth of how things are now, as I was, very fortunately, reminded of today.

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I think what happened this time really illustrates that tearing down leaders and disregarding their mental health is unavoidable in WoW raiding guilds. It’s never the goal of those who do this to hurt their leaders, or it rarely is. It’s just that WoW mythic raiding itself engenders high emotions, strong opinions, and frustration when things don’t go well (and there will always be times they don’t go well, it doesn’t matter if you’re a world 1 guild or a world 5000 guild). And people get caught up with their opinions and feelings, and forget to see the big picture when they eventually need to vent. Indeed, this happened right at the peak of our progression, when there was no real reason to be frustrated. And some of the people leading the charge this time are people who are 100% clear that this is what caused me to leave the game before and that it will retraumatize me now, and indeed even had once told me they wish they had behaved differently in the past. I know they hate knowing that they hurt me, and if people who already are trying hard not to hurt their leaders do this, it seems to me that this kind of stuff is inevitable.

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